Quick and easy pasta salad will help you watch your carbs

By J.M. Hirsch -
Associated Press -
Thursday, July 5, 2012

The trouble with being a food editor is that you eat. A lot.

It’s fun and wonderful and satisfying — and sometimes incredibly fattening. Especially if, like me, you already have spent most of your life wrestling with your weight. So lately I’ve been doing a lot of watching of carbs, trying hard to minimize them, or at least eat them mostly in the form of veggies.

That was my inspiration for this lower-carb pasta salad. I really crave pasta salads during the summer, and I crave them bursting with fatty mayo and carb-rich pasta.

It helps that I already like my pasta salads jammed with fresh vegetables. So for this recipe I loaded up with fresh, raw corn cut from the cob (yes, it’s delicious raw), crunchy red bell peppers, a little bit of red onion and scallions, some cherry tomatoes and a handful of peas.

For the mayo, I could have gone with low- or no-fat mayonnaise, but those can taste flat and artificial. Instead, I went with a blend of fat-free plain Greek yogurt and low-fat sour cream. The combination — amplified by a few seasonings — hits just the right textures and tastes I was looking for.

Now, about that pasta. The secret weapon here is an increasingly popular, newish product known as shirataki noodles, which have zero to 20 calories per serving. They are produced by several companies and generally are made from soy, yam or some combination of similar ingredients. With calorie counts like those, you easily can eat a satisfying mound of them.

The noodles — which are packed in bags of water and are sold in a variety of shapes, including penne — just need to be blanched in boiling water for a couple of minutes. The texture is a bit softer than traditional pasta, but when mixed with heaps of vegetables, the difference is minor.

HEALTHY-CARB PASTA SALAD

Penne-style shirataki noodles are ideal for this recipe, but they can be harder to find. As an alternative, use fettuccine and cut the noodles into 1- to 2-inch lengths.